Hello and welcome to Bad Gaze, a podcast all about evil and complicated queer people in history.

My name's Hugh Lemmy. I'm a writer and author. And I'm Ben Miller, a podcast all about evil and complicated queer people in history. My name's Hugh Lemmy.

I'm a writer and author. And I'm Ben Miller, a writer, researcher, and member of the board

of the Shvulles Museum in Berlin. Last week we were talking about Francis Bacon, one of the most

influential British artists of the 20th century, who had this very complex relationship of

massacism which shaped his life and his work.

Who are you talking about today, Ben?

Well, as I usually do, I want to start by telling you a story.

So in 1940, there were some American tourists who were sailing a boat near Whale Key,

a 711-acre private island, about 15 miles north of Nassau in the Bahamas. Not knowing whether

the island was inhabited or not, they beached their boat on one of its glorious white-sand beaches

and thought they would rest and relax and have a little picnic. Well, the party didn't last

too long. They were taken prisoner, they later reported, by a group of armed Bahamians, led by an eccentric, bronzed, muscular, short white person.

They were tied up, writes Tom Cheshire in an essay called The Boss of the Bahamas, and frog marched to a lighthouse.

The white person later emerging from the lighthouse dressed as a, quote, great white goddess and dancing around them before locking the

tourists in the garage. They were not set free till dawn. Their captor was today's subject,

the eccentric inheritor of an enormous oil fortune and gender non-conforming lesbian who dated Marlena

Dietrich, raced speedboats, and turned their private Bohemian island into a domain over which they ruled over native people with an iron fist,

while allowing themselves and their guests every possible eccentricity and pleasure, Joe Carstairs.

Before we get to the juicy bits.

It does feel a little bit like every lesbian that we profile who lived in the first half

of the 20th century has dated either Marlene Aditrich or Josephine Baker. Oh, wait until we get there.

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